N I G H T B R I N G E R . S E
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PHANTOMS WROUGHT BY CRISIS
The Society for Psychical Research
There was no Prince Charming and scant encouragement anywhere in 1882, when England's Frederic Myers and a handful of colleagues organized the Society for Psychical Research in order to investigate apparitional experiences. The founding members, however, boasted impressive credentials. Myers was a well-known poet, essayist, and classical lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. Joining him were Edmund Gurney, also a classical scholar at Cambridge; Henry Sidgwick, professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge; the tireless researcher Frank Podmore; and a number of other prominent academics, including Sir Oliver Lodge, an eminent physicist at Liverpool University, and Sir William Barrett, who was a professor of physics at the University College of Dublin.
The SPR's founders brought a healthy caution to their investigations. As the society's first official report stated: "The very last thing we expect to produce is a collection of narratives of a startling or blood-chilling character; our pages are far more likely to provoke sleep in the course of perusal than to banish it afterwards."
Still, the Society for Psychical Research attracted enormous public criticism and no little ridicule at the outset. Professor Sidgwick, the society's first president, later recalled being approached by indignant people who "did not like to see so many superior persons spending a serious part of their time on such matters, instead of writing a commentary on Plato, or studying the habits of beetles, or in some other way making a really useful contribution to science or learning."
Even those inclined to be liberal were put off by the franchise the society had outlined for itself. Wrote Sidgwick: "Some not unfriendly critics have given us to understand that if we had only confined ourselves to thought-reading and perhaps clairvoyance and similiar phenomena of the mesmeric trance, we might have had countenance; but that by taking in haunted houses and spirit-rapping and so forth, we make ourselves too absurd."
Undaunted, the society's founders were at work in earnest by the close of 1882. One of their first endeavors was to establish a committee to "make a careful investigation of any reports, resting on strong testimony, regarding apparitions at the moment of death." Another committee was entrusted with collecting existing material bearing on the history of psychical matters. "Our somewhat persistent and probing method of inquiry," noted Gurney, "has usually repelled the sentimental or crazy wonder-mongers who hang about the outskirts of such a subject as this."
The society started out by writing letters to London and provincial journals as well as to friends and colleagues requesting any information they might have on apparitional encounters. There was no lack of response; the problem was one of seeking to authenticate the reports, most of which were, at best, anecdotal recollections of past events. The investigators took as a given that human testimony is nothing if not fallible; observations may be incorrect, details sketchy, judgments biased - even when people are genuinely trying to relate the truth. The researchers applied rigorous standards to each case; whenever possible, they personally interviewed the narrator and sought out other living persons involved in the matter in order to get independent corroboration of the story.
It did not take the Society for Psychial Research investigators long to become convinced that they were on to something. As expressed in the society's first report: "The terrific quality, but its overwhelming quantity - overwhelming, we mean, to any further doubting of the reality of the class of phenomena."
Some of the cases were stunning, among them two experiences in which the percipients were unquestionably in full possession of their senses and highly unlikely to fall victim to delusions or visions. In the first incident, a Mr. Rawlinson was getting dressed in his home in Cheltenham one morning in December 1881 when he felt a powerful presence in the room. "On looking around," he related, "I saw no one, but then instantaneously (in my mind's eye, I suppose), every feature of the face and form of my old friend, X, arose. This, as you may imagine, made a great impression on me, and I went into my wife's room and told her what had occured, at the same time stating that I feared Mr. X must be dead."
Rawlinson and his wife spoke of it with growing concern several times that day. The next day, Rawlinson received a letter from X's brother reporting that X had died a quarter to nine the previous morning. Recounted Rawlinson: "This was the very time the occurrence happened in my dressing room." Rawlinson felt compelled to note that "we had heard some two months previously that X was suffering from cancer, but still we were in no immediate apprehension of his death." And he added: "I never on any other occasion had any hallucination of the senses, and sincerely trust I never again shall."
The other case was even more remarkable. The event had taken place on September 8, 1855, and it involved G. F. Russell Colt, later a British Army captain, but at the time a schoolboy at home with his parents near Edinburgh, Scotland. The family was a military one, and the eldest son, Oliver, age nineteen, was serving as a lieutenant with the Seventh Royal Fusiliers at Sebastopol in the Crimean War. Waking one night, Russell found his brother Oliver in his room; the youth seemed to be kneeling and was enveloped in a bright, phosphorescent mist.
Russell told himself that his eyes were playing trics on him; what he was seeing was nothing more than a beam of moonlight playing on a towel draped over a chair. The apparition persisted, however, "looking lovingly, imploringly and sadly at me," said Russell. It seemed so real that the schoolboy leaped from his bed and went to the window. But there was no moonlight; the night was black and heavy with rain. By now thoroughly frightened, Russell fled from the room. Looking behind him, he saw the apparition had a terrible wound on the right temple from which blood was gushing forth.
When Russell told his father, the older man snorted and advised him "not to repeat such nonsense." Yet it was anything but nonsense. More than a fortnight after the incident occurred, the family received the news of Oliver's death; he had been killed in the storming of a Turkish redoubt. Sometime after, they learned that a bullet had struck Oliver in the right temple, precisely where the wound had appeared to Russell. And there was more. Related Russell: "Oliver had then been some months before Sebastopol and had recently written to me in low spirits and evidently unwell, a letter to which I replied urging him to cheer up, adding half-facetiously, that if anything did happen to him, he must let me see him again in the old room where we had so often had ... a cozy chat at night."
In 1886, Gurney, Myers, and Podmore published what was the most ambitious piece of psychical research to date, a two-volume, 1,400-page survey entitled Phantasms of the Living. The purpose of the report, wrote Myers, was "to open an inquiry which was manifestly impending, and to lay the foundation-stone of a study which will loom large in the approaching age. "The sheer size of the work indicated the massive volume of evidence and firsthand accounts available to the psychical researchers, and the authors believed that the book banished any remaining doubts about the reality of phantom encounters. The goal, then, was to attempt to classify and understand these experiences. In so doing, the three investigators opened a debate that continues to this day.
In attempting to explain apparitions, Phantasms of the Living advanced a theory based on telepathy - a term actually coined by Myers to replace the unwieldy "thought-transference." In the cases collected in Phantasms, the authors said, they examined "the ability of one mind to impress or be impressed by another mind other than through the recognized channels of sense." In other words, the percipient might actually be recieving a telepathic signal from the apparent - the person represented by the apparition. In fact, according to this theory of telepathy, the apparent need not be present in any sense in order to be represented as a phantom. As Myers later summed it up: "Instead of describing a 'ghost' as a dead person permitted to communicate with the living, let us define it as a manifestation of persistent personal energy."
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